Taiwanese start-ups pushing ahead with AI tech
台灣十家最酷科技新創 AI安全帽攻進歐美

Tue, Apr 10, 2018 - Page 14

The Ministry of Science and Technology last week published a list of the “10 coolest Taiwanese tech start-ups” for the year 2017. The list was made up of five companies involved in artificial intelligence (AI), two in the Internet of Things, a further two in biomedical sciences and another working with augmented and virtual reality.

One of the companies on the list is JARVISH, founded by Lu Tsung-hsien, which in February last year announced the world’s first mass-produced “smart” safety helmet. Lu says the company carried out R&D, built a team and made its product all within Taiwan. According to Lu, the main advantage of their product is it has AI technology embedded within the helmet which is able to detect if a motorcycle has crashed and then, via a smartphone app synchronized with the helmet, use conversational robotics to initiate a handsfree emergency call.

Meanwhile, in a television report recently broadcast by the BBC called “In Your Face: China’s all-seeing state,” a reporter was allowed access to a surveillance center in China’s Guizhou Province to carry out a real-time experiment. After the journalist’s face was scanned and registered on its system as a suspect, it took only seven minutes, walking from Guiyang city center to the city’s train terminus, for the journalist to be apprehended by Chinese police. The report has sparked intense debate online.

Chen says that in the past, surveillance systems would only judge the movement of objects, but Umbo Light also uses objects’ behavioral patterns to determine whether a security problem exists. After performing an analysis, if behavior such as wall climbing, breaking in or the shadowing of an individual is detected, an alert is instantly sent to the client.

Chen explains the technology is like having an experienced AI security guard on duty 365 days a year, 7 days a week and will dramatically reduce the human resource cost of security, which was previously reliant on the human eye.

During a recent interview, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk said he believes artificial intelligence is more dangerous than nuclear weapons:

“I am really quite close, I am very close, to the cutting edge in AI and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than almost anyone knows and the rate of improvement is exponential.

“So the rate of improvement is really dramatic. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity. I think that is the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.

“And mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes... So why do we have no regulatory oversight? This is insane.”

Questions

1. Do you agree with Musk that AI has the potential to evolve into a threat more dangerous to humanity than nuclear weapons?

2. Musk has called for regulatory oversight of artificial intelligence. Do you think this is a good idea — or even possible?

3. Are you worried by the number of surveillance cameras in operation today? Are we sleepwalking into becoming a “surveillance state”?